Introducing Mozilla Prism

Prism is a new project from Mozilla Labs that essentially dresses up a web applications as desktop applications. Prism can create desktop, start menu, and quick launch desktop shortcuts for any given URL. The shortcuts launch the web application in a undecorated application window running Firefox underneath.

Prism works well for web applications, where all the links point to the domain where the application is running from. If you there are links to other domains, Prism will open those links in FireFox instead of the Prim application window. Other than launching the web application in a undecorated application window, I don’t see how different this is from just creating a internet shortcut. The web application is not downloaded, you still need internet access, and you are still limited by the browser limitations for it to really feel like a desktop application.

I think some great opportunities will emerge if you can mashup Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, and some great JavaScript libraries like YUI!, jQuery, or Ext JS. This is definitely a technology to watch.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 1:04 pmand is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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@Augusto – I should have been a bit more clear about that… Nothing, other than a shortcut, gets installed. The dialog you see is used by the desktop user to create a URL shortcut for a given website. Clicking Ok creates these shortcuts on the desktop. Clicking these shortcuts launches the web application in a chromeless application browser.